’You won’t meet an old man, or a young man in love,’ he continued after a pause, ‘because you love your daughter too much to subject her to the stratagems of an old rake, and because you, Baroness Hulot, sister of the old Lieutenant-General who commanded the old grenadiers of the Imperial Guard, will not bring yourself to accept the man of energy whatever his origins. For he might be an ordinary workman, just as someone who is a millionaire today was an ordinary mechanic, overseer, or foreman ten years ago. And then, seeing your daughter, with the impulses of a 20-year-old, perhaps about to dishonour you, you will say to yourself, “Better that I should be the one to dishonour myself, and if Monsieur Crevel will keep my secret, I’ll earn my daughter’s dowry, two hundred thousand francs, for ten years of attachment to that former glove-merchant, Père Crevel!” I’m irritating you, and what I’m saying is profoundly immoral, isn’t it? But if you were consumed by an irresistible passion, you would reason in the way women in love do, so as to justify yielding to me. Well, Hortense’s interests will put these capitulations of conscience in your heart.’
‘Hortense still has an uncle.’
‘Who? Père Fischer? He’s winding up his business, and that’s the Baron’s fault too, for he takes his rake-off from all the cash-boxes that are within his reach.’
‘Oh, Madame, your husband has already run through the old Lieutenant-General’s economies. He’s furnished his singer’s house with them. Come, are you going to let me go with no hope?’
‘Goodbye, Monsieur. It is easy to recover from a passion for a woman of my age, and you will come to have Christian thoughts. God protects the unfortunate.’
The Baroness got up to compel the Captain to withdraw and she made him go back into the drawing-room.
‘Should the beautiful Madame Hulot be living amidst such tattered furnishings?’ he said.
And he pointed to an old lamp, a chandelier that had lost its gilt, the threadbare carpet, in short to all the ragged remnants of opulence which turned the big white, red, and gold drawing-room into a corpse of the festivities of the Empire.
‘Virtue sheds its lustre on all that. I have no desire to owe magnificent furnishings to the beauty which you say I have, by turning it into a snare for wolves, a trap for hundred-sou pieces!’
The captain bit his lip as he recognized the terms he had used to denounce Josépha’s greed.
‘And for whose sake are you so determined?’ he asked.
By now the Baroness had conducted the former perfumer as far as the door.
‘For a libertine!’ he added, pursing his lips with all the contempt of a virtuous millionaire.
‘If you were right, Monsieur, there would be some merit in my faithfulness, that’s all.’
She left the Captain with a farewell nod of the kind one makes to get rid of a tiresome visitor, and turned round too smartly to see him assume his pose for the last time.
She went to re-open the doors she had closed and could not see Crevel’s threatening farewell gesture. She walked with a proud, noble bearing like a martyr going to the Coliseum. Nevertheless, her strength was exhausted, for she collapsed onto the sofa of her blue boudoir like a woman about to faint, and her eyes remained fixed on the ruined summerhouse where her daughter was chatting with Cousin Bette.
From the first days of her marriage until now, the Baroness had loved her husband as Josephine, finally, had come to love Napoleon, with an admiring, maternal, but submissive love. Though she had been unaware of the details which Crevel had just given her, she nevertheless knew very well that, for twenty years, Hulot had been unfaithful to her. But she had drawn a leaden veil over her eyes; she had wept in silence and had never let fall a word of reproach. In return for this angelic sweetness of temper, she had earned her husband’s veneration and was surrounded by an almost divine cult.
A woman’s affection for her husband, the respect with which she surrounds him, are contagious in her family. Hortense thought her father was a perfect model of conjugal love. As for Hulot’s son, brought up as he was to admire the Baron, whom everyone saw as one of the giants who had helped Napoleon, he knew he owed his position to his father’s name, position, and reputation. Besides, the influence of childhood impressions lasts a long time and he was still afraid of his father. So even if he had suspected the misdemeanours revealed by Crevel, he would have respected his father too much to complain, and he would have excused them with reasons stemming from a man’s way of looking at these things.
The extraordinary devotion of this noble, beautiful woman must now be explained, and here, in a few words, is the story of her life.